


roses are red/carnations are blue

by sinisterhand



Category: Falsettos - Lapine/Finn
Genre: 5+1 Things, Angst, Gen, Short One Shot, trina centric, trina pov, very purple and emo and such but well what can ya do
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-01 10:54:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20813945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinisterhand/pseuds/sinisterhand
Summary: Five times Trina looked at Whizzer & one time she didn’t.





	roses are red/carnations are blue

**Author's Note:**

> The major character death warning is only implied and well, this is Falsettos. Same with the ship tags. Uh, this is rated Teen for swears and Risque Implication and sadness, but again. It's a Falsettos fic. I am still not totally sure how those ratings work.  
Mostly old and only cleaned up and added to a little bit today; mostly unedited, unbetaed, as usual all concrit welcomed but please do not be too mean to me. If you see any glaring mechanics errors please, please tell me so I can fix it.  
I'm just posting this so I can go to bed. Yes I am still feeling things about Falsettos what about it.
> 
> Edited 09/29/19: I said Friday when I meant Sunday. Thanks very much to Syd for letting me know :)

**i.**

When she wakes up Marvin has another bandage where his throat meets his jaw. He tells her it’s a cut from shaving. She privately thinks that the bandage is a little large for a careless mistake, but Trina has faith. She keeps the peace. She does what she is told. She doesn't know how to say  _ you smell of a cologne I know you hate  _ or  _ you seem more alive these days, but I know it isn’t for me. _

She hates Whizzer more than she’s ever let herself hate anything. His false smile and his false name and the way he’s six foot slim and looms over even Marvin, the loomer, the way Jason loves him and Marvin loves him. She doesn’t know why he had to upset her picket-fence, her family, her life. Whizzer seems, from Italian leather belt to shameless hickey, like a man with no regrets. Trina is so jealous she could cry with a something she doesn’t have the courage to put in words. The thing in his eyes when Marvin turns away in disgust is not a fire she is familiar with. Marvin watches him like the sun, a soft shape in his jaw that she’s never seen before. Whizzer hardly seems to notice, and perhaps that’s what hurts her most of all.

Whizzer corners her in the kitchen. Her fingers instinctively clench around the knife, and with a breath she forces herself to let go. Whizzer doesn’t  _ laugh _ , exactly, but something in the tilt of his eyes is sharp and amused and puts her immediately on edge. “Do I really make you so…” Trina smooths her face neutral and fixes her hair, doing her best to ignore the man at her shoulder. Whizzer does smile, this time. “Uncomfortable.” The top two buttons of his shirt are undone still, and Trina feels a little insulted that Marvin clearly doesn’t think enough of her to even try and be discreet. It isn’t a question. They both know it isn’t a question. 

  
  


**ii.**

She can hear Marvin and Whizzer fighting on the couch. It’s a stupid, childish little quibble that she wouldn’t give a second thought if not for the fact that her husband only told her he wanted a divorce six months ago. Their voices rise and fall, indignant, combative, almost reassuringly, like the rhythms of beach waves, or passing traffic at night. Trina doesn’t know if Marvin would have ever come out and said it, changed things, burst the bubble or the blister if she hadn’t caught them together, rutting like animals, his mouth slack with pleasure. She tunes back into the quarrel. Something insignificant about clothes and closets, and some petty bit of her hopes it too will sour on Marvin, fester and grow, sap the quick from his eyes again and make him come creeping back, ashamed, in the dead of night, smelling like alcohol just the same as before, and let her look him in the face and tell him— what? And that’s where the thought collapses. Even now, Trina doesn’t know. Isn’t that just pathetic of her. 

Instead of investigating that further, she turns back to the quarrel, watching idly like a birder or a biddy. Whizzer hooks his fingers around the knot of Marvin’s tie and  _ yanks _ , and watching the flash-fire challenge of a smile wrap around Marvin’s face, Trina looks away in disgust again. She sees Jason hovering in a doorway, face flickering through emotions too fast to count. She gets up. Probably best to usher them both away. Whizzer says something low and threatening, and Marvin laughs like she’s never heard before.

  
  


**iii.**

There’s a chance she’s a bad person. She’s known for a while, has probed the thought guiltily like a loose tooth, examined it again and again after Jason, grinning, ran into Whizzer’s arms at the baseball game. Marvin had looked concussed, had looked terrified, had looked like a man on the edge of a glorious cliff. 

Whizzer asked  _ her _ if Marvin had tried to crawl back into the closet while he’d been gone. She supposes that he thought if anyone knew about Marvin’s feeble and sparse attempts at heterosexuality, it would be her, and he was only mostly wrong. Possibly she dislikes Whizzer simply because he makes Marvin happy and she doesn’t think Marvin deserves him; Whizzer is actually surprisingly charming when he isn’t —  well, homewrecking, sleek and witty and with something a little more tolerable than pity in his eyes when he watched her over the sugar bowl, voice breaking, begging Marvin to just stay the night. When Whizzer had appeared, spitting bravado and barely balding, Marvin tried to hide behind Doctor Charlotte. It was pathetic, and she felt overwhelmed with second-hand gratitude when Whizzer did his best to ignore it, nodding regally at Mendel and shaking his hand.

Trina didn’t feel jealous, exactly, as it had been years since she let Marvin have something over her like jealousy, but when you try so hard to love the father of your child it nearly kills you— Well. It takes a while to forget, that kind of wanting, that labour of love. She whispers to Mendel, that old hysterical edge creeping into her voice again, “ex-husband’s ex-lover!” and tells herself that at least Marvin isn’t bringing her roses the morning after collapsing into bed at two AM, too dead to the world on exhilaration to care that he’d woken her up. 

Trina feels twitchy and small again, like she’s sitting in Mendel’s front room gritting her teeth against the impulse to pour her quivering guts onto his office floor. She works it out. It takes her three miles to be alright again but she can’t quite separate her thoughts from Whizzer’s wide and guileless smile like it’s burned on her retinas, like looking at the sun.

  
  


**iv.**

Marvin and Whizzer come to dinner and Trina has no excuse. Jason is sleeping over at that nice Anthony boy’s house, so she can’t blame him. Marvin didn’t have to insist or shout or say cruel blunt things to earn bringing the previous wrecker of a home into its newness. Whizzer was invited, like Marvin or Marvin’s friend the doctor. She called Whizzer before she called Marvin, twisting the cord around her finger. Mendel put his hands on her shoulders and she leaned into him with a sigh of relief, hands stilling, before she heard the phone stop ringing and Whizzer say “Hello?” and her back snapped straight again. He sounded surprised. 

Dinner has been served, Marvin and Whizzer too absorbed with saying quiet and sincere things pretty much  _ into _ each other’s mouths to pay much attention, but effusively appreciated by the doctor and her friend. Trina has her doubts about “friends”, too, as the kind of person who lives with another woman and would befriend Marvin in his Post-Whizzer Years, when as she understood it he was mostly alternating between taking it up the ass from strangers and sinking into a quagmire of loneliness from destroying all his personal relationships, was not entirely exempt from suspicion, but, well. The friend and the doctor are nice, understanding women who sometimes bring her excellent casseroles and questionable gefilte-fish and understand how awful Marvin is when he’s not being magnetic, so Trina isn’t inclined to look too hard. 

Seeing Marvin and Whizzer together makes her feel— something. It just seems  _ easy _ for him, after a lifetime of staying silent then boiling over. Whizzer, too, has settled into himself in delayed adulthood, and no longer seems to need to demonstrate nightly, ostentatiously and in a way that left Marvin tearing his hair out and blowing up at Mendel, how much Marvin doesn’t mean to him, and she covets their familiarity, envies the way their hands fall without looking into each other under the table. After two years apart they have only learned the game of their togetherness even better. She and Marvin have only just started to forget the game of their apartness. She loves Mendel, but he isn’t Marvin, and she doesn’t want him to be, but change is ever change, uncomfortable like the itch of forming scabs.

  
  


**v.**

It’s Sunday night, which means Trina is scheduled to pick up Jason and fight with Marvin about something she isn’t upset about. She refuses to break eye contact with Marvin because she spent more than a decade doing that and she’s seeing a therapist who’s more helpful than Mendel now (she loves her husband, she does, but he’s a very nervous man and she’s a very nervous woman and there really are better places to have a romantic meeting than an hourlong parade of neuroses) but she still notices Whizzer on the couch. It would be hard not to notice him, really, and she sees him make eye contact with Jason over Marvin’s shoulder. 

Today the fight is loud and shallow, something about the bar mitzvah that’s mostly about how much Marvin hates his mother and only a little about the importance of tradition, and it may not be a normal person’s idea of improvement but this is by far the least hostile interaction they’ve had with even a  _ mention _ of Marvin’s mother in fifteen years so Trina’s pretty goddamn content with it even if she’s actively resisting the urge to throw a chair at his head. The way they used to fight was vicious and below-the-belt, the kind of thing that crescendoed from being about the dishes or the dinner to him calling her a coward and her calling him one right back until Trina slunk off to go cry in the shower and Marvin slammed out of the house to go cruising. 

Speaking of that, she says something a little low about his “ _ lifestyle” _ and thinks that the fact Marvin doesn’t flinch anymore at the mention of Whizzer in arguments like this is really a miniscule victory but it still counts. They’re both growing up a little bit, lately, maybe, fifteen years late but no longer a scared girl and a headstrong boy. Marvin buries his head in his hands and condescends in a muffled voice, and Jason takes advantage of his distraction to inch out from between his dueling parents and join Whizzer on the couch. Whizzer ruffles his hair and Jason breaks into a smile, and it’s enough to make Trina regret fighting just a little bit.

  
  


**+i.**

It hurts somewhere in her dull center to look at Whizzer these days, taut cheeks and sharp eyes (obviously he knows he’s going to die. Trina couldn’t possibly— it would be ridiculous to begrudge him even that. She just wishes she couldn’t see his certainty in the lines of his face when he laughs, when he eats, when he folds up into himself and withdraws away from Marvin’s hurt expressions— it’s not unreasonable that she doesn’t like to see it. It feels private. Graphic. Obscene.) So she doesn’t. 

Jason’s voice soars, uncracking, and she’s proud to bursting. The line of Mendel’s body is craned towards him like a tuning fork, his hands clenching like he can catch the prayers in them, just as encouraging as he would be if Jason was at bat hitting (or missing) a home run. Cordelia and Charlotte lean into each other, almost crying with the moment’s unsaids, and Trina thinks about how she’d stubbornly categorized them as roommates for months— a little stupid in that way she always has been. Has had to be. The tenderness in Marvin’s eyes hits her like a wave, staggering, and she blinks as he puts a hand on her son’s shoulder. Marvin looks simultaneously more rumpled and weathered than ever, cast pointedly in fluorescent lights, and younger than she’s seen him since high school. 

Jason finishes his reading, beaming victoriously. A white hospital robe brushes past her and out the door, Dr. Charlotte murmuring apology, and Marvin looks undone. Mendel ushers her out with a hand against the small of her back, and she doesn’t look for Whizzer’s pale sick face, or that of her ex-husband. She leaves.

  
  



End file.
